


[Fandom stats] Sherlockian fandom stats (221B Con 2014)

by pennswoods, strangelock, toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [3]
Category: Elementary (TV), Fandom - Fandom, Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-13
Updated: 2014-05-13
Packaged: 2018-01-24 14:20:45
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1608254
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pennswoods/pseuds/pennswoods, https://archiveofourown.org/users/strangelock/pseuds/strangelock, https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Slides and notes from a talk on Sherlock Holmes in fandom.  Presented at 221B Con in April 2014.</p><p>  <a href="https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Cu1PofdD-sDpgMw4IxBaJdHDpSernILrPNkL6T8sPyk/edit#slide=id.g1cbf64342_13">Full slide deck on Google Drive</a></p>
            </blockquote>





	[Fandom stats] Sherlockian fandom stats (221B Con 2014)

**Author's Note:**

> **You can find the full set of slides and speaker notes[here](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Cu1PofdD-sDpgMw4IxBaJdHDpSernILrPNkL6T8sPyk/edit). If any of the below images are broken, check this link!**
> 
> Speaker notes are given below each slide. Each speaker/slide creator is listed at the beginning of the speaker notes.
> 
> With the exceptions below, [Sherlockian fandom stats (221B Con 2014)](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1608254) by pennswoods, strangelock, and destinationtoast is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). It may be excerpted, copied, redistributed, remixed, transformed, or built upon so long as attribution is given. The artwork included on some slides is not covered under this license; you must get permission from the credited artists to reproduce their work.

**221B Con Fandom Stats slides**

Presented by [destinationtoast](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com), [strangelock](http://tmblr.co/muOc4OJP9lVQth1P7kc8cPA), and [penns-woods](http://tmblr.co/mO3GhdAiY1owQt5xKOtTtvw) \- April 2014

[Full slide deck on Google Drive](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Cu1PofdD-sDpgMw4IxBaJdHDpSernILrPNkL6T8sPyk/edit#slide=id.g1cbf64342_13) (you can view the details of slides more easily here)

Penns-woods:

Why Stats - Why not?

-We sometimes hear the refrain by those who are more text oriented that ‘They don’t do math’, but just as the development of print literacy is be a tool of empowerment and joy and self-expression, so is quantitative literacy.

-There are different kinds of mathematics, just as there are different subfields in linguistics or different genres within literature. Statistics provides us with a set of tools for collecting and analyzing often large quantities of data and can be applied across many different fields.

-Knowledge of statistics can also be useful to help protect you from being fooled by numbers.

-Mycroft’s repeated phrase to Sherlock in this latest season of the BBC series ‘Balance of probability’ suggests he’s a fan of statistical methods.

-Hence, statistics are pretty damn sexy.

IMAGE MODIFIED FROM: http://i.imgur.com/3SZqjRo.jpg

Penns-woods:

WHY STATISTICS

-Not only is Mycroft clearly a fan, but statistics provides us with a different kind of data for answering certain kinds of questions.

-We won’t claim to prove anything with statistics, but we will be using our data to look for evidence of certain patterns in some fandom spaces.

-There is a tendency in some places to place greater weight on quantitative data than on qualitative data as more convincing evidence either for or against something.

-It’s key to keep in mind that statistics or quantitative data is good for answering certain types of questions (e.g. is there more Elementary genfic than Elementary shipping fic) but cannot answer others (e.g. why isn’t there more femmeslash?)

-But fortunately fandom is not that kind of space and we consider these fandom stats just another kind of fandom meta only this time we’re analyzing numbers and not dialog, camera angles or lighting choices.

IMAGE FROM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jeremy_Brett.jpg

Penns-woods:

-One of the reasons we’re not claiming to prove something is due to the nature of the kind of numbers we’re looking at. For the most part, we will be looking at raw numbers and also general characteristics of these raw numbers.

-Two main categories of stats include descriptive and inferential statistics. We’ll be focusing mainly on descriptive statistics in this presentation. They allow us to describe numerical data to save space and time and to describe the characteristics of the specific parts of fandom (the samples) we’re investigating.

-For the data we are looking at descriptive statistics make the most sense. We are only able to look at certain sites using certain tools and these only represent a portion of the fandom and fandom practices. We recognize that fandom is diverse and that certain fans are drawn to certain sites more than others and won’t attempt to generalize from this data to all of fandom.

-Toasty will talk a little more about the specific parts of fandom and fan sites we are looking at that represent our sample.

Toasty:

A lot of the data we’ll be talking about comes from AO3, because they have a very accessible and well-organized system of tagging and searching.  Some of the data I’ll be presenting is nearly impossible to gather on other platforms.  But that doesn’t mean that AO3 is representative of the fandom as a whole.  You have to apply for an invitation to post there, so there’s a higher barrier to entry than some platforms.  And it has a bunch of quirks and biases as a platform.  So when I talk about what’s popular on AO3, it’s not necessarily true everywhere, or anywhere besides AO3!

There's also more data here from BBC Sherlock than other adaptations.  That's partly because there is a lot of data about BBC Sherlock right now, but also largely because the presenters are all big BBC fans, so that's where they started looking. (We also are fans of other versions of Sherlock Holmes, but we know less about the nuances of fanworks in those fandoms.)  We would be so excited if some of you wanted to ask statistical questions about your favorite Sherlockian fandom -- or other fandoms!

Toasty:

The two major fanfiction archives right now that are open to all fandoms are Archive of our Own and Fanfiction.net (AO3 also has some fanworks like fanart and podfics, but mostly fanfic).  If we look at the TV-related fandoms in each of these archives, Sherlock is in the top five in both cases.

Sherlock is also in the 10 fandoms overall on AO3.

Toasty:

BBC Sherlock is not the only active Sherlockian fandom, although it’s currently the most popular by quite a bit, with over 90K fanfics on the two main archives.  House, a show which has clear connections to Sherlock Holmes, also had a quite active fandom.  But ACD’s original characters also have generated over 5,000 fanfics, Elementary is currently active, and you can also find fanfic for a number of other versions of Sherlock Holmes.

(Threshold: 100 fics)

Toasty:

monthly fanwork production on AO3

We see a jump in activity with each new season of the show -- the biggest jumps happen after the UK airdates.  There also appear to be some effects of holiday gift exchanges and summer breaks (these times are active outside the Sherlock fandom as well).  Setlock may have also contributed to the bump in mid-2013.

AO3 has also gotten much more popular over time, so some of the is due to an increase in the archive’s popularity rather than the fandom’s.  

  
  


Penns-woods: 

To follow up on Toasty’s look at the popularity of different versions of Sherlock, I decided to compare the fanworks output of the two most recent modern AUs of Sherlock Holmes, which have often been compared in the press and in the fandom due to their modern settings, Elementary and BBC Sherlock. These are two very differently formatted shows which have been around for different lengths of time at this point, so I decided to take a compare their fanworks output over a similar time-frame in each show’s history:

Specifically, I compared the output of fanworks posted to Ao3 for each show after the first 9 months, one year and then after 18 months. This is due to the fact that Elementary's first episode aired in the US approximately 18 months ago (September 27, 2012). For the sake of consistency I searched the tag "Sherlock TV" for BBC Sherlock related fanworks and "Elementary TV" for Elementary related fanworks.

Note again: this is just Ao3, and does not take into account activity on other platforms like Tumblr. Also note that Ao3 had different levels of activity when these shows started airing, and there may be other factors making it tricky to directly compare.

Artwork:  [ http://ignify.tumblr.com/post/43828937904 ](http://ignify.tumblr.com/post/43828937904)

Toasty:

One more caveat: We’re going to be analyzing the tags that people use to describe their fanworks rather than the actual content of the stories and posts themselves.

Fanfiction has a bit of a reputation, at least in some circles, for being mostly smut. Is it?

Toasty:

NR = not rated

At least 61% is not porn.  :)  but that doesn’t mean it’s not about romance or relationships....

For comparison, FFNet doesn’t allow Explicit fic.  81% of fic rated Teen or lower:

16% rated K (Kids)

22% rated K+ (Kids+; like PG)

42% rated T (Teen)

19% rated M (Mature)

Toasty:

There are indeed lots of stories featuring relationships. Most in this fandom are M/M (slash). We'll be talking more about specific ships later.

These categories are not mutually exclusive.  And some people tend to tag a relationship category only when the relationship is the main focus, while others tag even for minor background relationships.

FFNet doesn’t have this type of breakdown, but 43% of the Sherlock fanfic is labeled “Romance” genre.

Toasty:

Most of the fanfiction is relatively short .

This fandom has a particular kind of short story that is popular -- 221Bs.  They are exactly 221 words long, and the last word starts with B.  Stories of exactly 221 words are more than 10 times more popular in the Sherlock fandom than average on AO3.

Toasty:

'Angst' and 'Fluff' are common tags across most fandoms. ('Post-Reichenbach' is not. :) )

12% of Sherlock fanfic is tagged 'Angst'

Toasty:

‘Popularity’ can mean lots of things -- what gets written a lot?  what gets read a lot?  what gets lots of kudos, bookmarks, comments, etc?  What gets lots of kudos per hit?  Each of these reveals different things about popularity, and various factors -- including luck -- play a big role in all of them. We’ve just used median kudos as a starting point here.

While long fics are rarely written, they are very popular by this metric.

Toasty:

For ratings, we also see a very different pattern in what is commonly written vs. what gets the most kudos.   Preference for higher ratings is partly due to a preference for high word count (see previous slide) and a correlation between word count and rating.  However, when word count is factored out, a notable preference for Explicit fic remains.

For relationship categories, we still see a slash preference, but less pronounced than the proportion of how much is written.

  


Toasty:

Omegaverse = 160 kudos (median)

This is a handpicked set of tags --  the set of common tags and any other tags that occurred to me to test that turned out to have a higher median number of kudos than the fandom overall.  so lots of tags are missing.

Some of these categories don’t have very many fics at all (Merlock, Sussex)

We see here lots of tags related to sexuality, relationships, and alternate universes.  Some fandom-specific like Sussex, Fawnlock, Red Pants.  We’ll be revisiting the popularity of Asexuality later...

Strangelock:

These 26 fandoms represent the top 20 fandoms crossed with Sherlock. Rank is based on total fic count, so fandoms with equal fic counts get equal ranks (hence there are some ties and more than 20 total).

Logos for the top 7 are at right for easier viewing (these are excluded from the wordle on following slide)

Strangelock:

AO3 wrangles together tags to identify synonyms and subsets.  So if you search for the tag on the left, you also get all the results with tags on the right.  But if you search for a tag on the right, you only get results from that specific fandom.

Some of this still comes down to opinion, and opinions may differ.  The Great Mouse Detective is not one of the fandoms included in the tag on the left.

Strangelock:

We can be glad that AO3 does this tag wrangling, a process also known as normalization.  Because people have a lot of quirky ways of tagging.  These are a few tags used for “Fandom” on Harry Potter fic.  (The one in red is the one AO3 considers canonical.)  The Tumblr style tags are awesome and fun, but we would like to encourage AO3 authors to also use canonical tags so that it’s easier to immediately find your work.  (And do data analysis on it! ;) )

Strangelock:

These 23 fandoms represent the top crossover fandoms by total kudos count (more than 1000 kudos total)

Again, the top 7 fandoms are at right, they are still the top 7 but the sequence has changed. So DW has more fics, but HP has more kudos for fewer fics.

The names in red highlight fandoms that are not in the top 20 by rank (which is based on number of fics). So these fandoms have more kudos than some that have more fics.

More interestingly, Garden Spells represents one fic with 1228 kudos.

Strangelock:

Same 20 fandoms in the top 20 by rank, broken down by Sherlock Holmes adaptation. Notice how BBC dwarfs everything.

NOS is for those fics that only use the fandom “Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms” which doesn’t specify which Sherlock, so it could be any.

Strangelock:

When we exclude BBC, we get 28 fandoms in the top 11 by rank. 

Cabin Pressure, X-men, and Buffy drop way down the list (i.e., they mostly crossover with BBC). 

Labyrinth, Good Omens, Hitchhiker, Maurice and Sandman disappear.

DCU, Hawaii Five-O, Game of Thrones, Howl’s Moving Castle, Jeeves & Wooster, Mary Russell, Phantom of the Opera, and Ripper Street move up in rank.

Strangelock:

These are the top Sherlock crossovers, excluding the top 7 to highlight some of the less common ones. (Size represents number of works.)

[oops Tolkien typo sorry! It got pasted into multiple slides; all except the word cloud graphic are fixed in the full slide deck. ]

Toasty:

These are the top ten most common relationships on AO3.  AO3 has a very strong recency bias -- AO3 gets more popular with each passing month/year, so this over-represents currently active ships, rather than being the most popular ships of all time.

  
There is more Johnlock on AO3 than any other single relationship.  And even the platonic Johnlock tag -- indicated with an ampersand rather than a slash -- makes it into the top 10.  Basically, people really like writing about John and Sherlock.

Toasty:

If we break it down by type of Sherlock fandom, we see that about half the fanfic in most of the Sherlockian fandoms is devoted to Holmes/Watson slash (the differences between the first four fandoms shown here fluctuate some over time and are not statistically significant).  Elementary, however, has a substantially lower proportion of fanfic devoted to Holmes/Watson as a romance.  

Artwork:  [ http://ireallyshouldbedrawing.tumblr.com/post/69294346062 ](http://ireallyshouldbedrawing.tumblr.com/post/69294346062)

Toasty:

The percentage of BBC Sherlock fanworks on AO3 devoted to Johnlock has remained remarkably steady over time, hovering right around 50% of the fanworks.

(Percent of Sherlock works per month shown here)

Toasty: 

The second most popular pairing in the BBC fandom on AO3 is Mycroft and Lestrade, despite their not having appeared onscreen together prior to S3.  Moriarty and Sebastian Moran were also quite popular following S2.  Sherlock and Molly is another popular pairing.  We’ll be talking later about shifts in shipping following S3.

In Elementary, Sherlock/Joan is the most popular pairing, and after that, the biggest ships involve pairing one of the main characters with either Irene or Marcus.  I don’t want to be spoilery about certain revelations in Elementary, but if you’re wondering whether the Irene Adler tag accounts for certain plot points -- I’ll tell you that it does.  The AO3 tag wrangling that Strangelock discussed before allows for exactly the sorts of things to get categorized together that you’d hope for here.

  
Artwork:  [ http://patatomato.deviantart.com/art/Mystrade-288318283 ](http://patatomato.deviantart.com/art/Mystrade-288318283)

Strangelock:

While relatively few Sherlock fics are tagged ‘Asexuality’ (or related tags), nearly 40% of all ace-related fic is in the Sherlock fandom.

Note: doing the search in different ways yields very different results; searching for ‘Asexuality’ in the ‘Any Field’ search box will return fics with asexuality mentioned anywhere, including if the author includes a line in their summary like, “Sherlock is definitely not asexual.”  In this case it’s better to search for ‘Asexuality’ in the ‘Additional Tags’ field.

Strangelock:

It’s not always clear which character(s) and/or relationships are asexual from tags, though some authors do use tags like ‘asexual!Sherlock’.  But these are the most common relationships found in Sherlock ace-fic.

Toasty: 

Now we’re going to look at tag activity on Tumblr (posts per day using a given tag) -- in the lead up to S3 and following it.  Caveat: a lot of data seems to be missing when you ask Tumblr (via the API, as I did here) for uses of really popular tags like #sherlock.  Data may also be missing here; these numbers may be too low.

Fan tracking of Sherlock filming and related pre-season activity eventually settled on using the #setlock tag on Tumblr and Twitter, after some initial activity in other tags like #replacesherlockquotewithgrape (following set pics of Martin with grapes in his eyes).  The items in red indicate dates when the Sherlock folks were filming in public, and the dates in purple are BBC promotional events.  Green is the show airing.

Peak use:  958 uses in one day

Thanks so much to dudeufugly for help with matching up the dates/events.  More info courtesy of dudeufugly:

march 25 \- setlock begins with filming of bonfire scene in Bristol  <http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/46338877453/sherlock-series-3-spoilers-so-far-recap-march-25th>

april 14 \- highest ever setlock views for me personally. Andrew was on set! filming at Bart's  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/47984759039/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-april-14th ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/47984759039/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-april-14th)

april 22 \- E2 starts filming (the wedding)  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/48636398456/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-april-22nd ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/48636398456/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-april-22nd)

May 21 \- E2 filming at Gower - last filming before break  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/51015196720/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-may-21st ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/51015196720/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-round-up-may-21st)

july 19 \- SDCC Sherlock Comic Con :  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/55814444966/they-couldnt-be-on-stage-in-person-but-they-made ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/55814444966/they-couldnt-be-on-stage-in-person-but-they-made)

aug 2 \- teaser for TEH came out after RBF repeat on tv:  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/57185134587/sherlock-series-3-teaser-trailer-bbc-one ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/57185134587/sherlock-series-3-teaser-trailer-bbc-one)

aug 21 \- Gower street filming:  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/58959026943/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-roundup-august-21st ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/58959026943/spoilers-sherlock-series-3-roundup-august-21st)

sep1  \- BBC autumn programme trailer with exclusive new sherlock footage came out :  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/59915506054/bbcone-our-brand-new-original-british-drama ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/59915506054/bbcone-our-brand-new-original-british-drama) (it leaked a day early though)

sep 19 \- BBC posted " a look behind the scenes" photos:  [ http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/61673385255/a-look-behind-the-scenes-of-sherlock-series-3-via ](http://dudeufugly.tumblr.com/post/61673385255/a-look-behind-the-scenes-of-sherlock-series-3-via)

Images: ~~Steve Lawes~~   Robert Viglasky (thanks for catching the error, [twotwoonebeemine](http://tmblr.co/mTiSy0KWDqC9tLU9eRPV9_Q) !) ; BBC One

Toasty:

After the BBC teaser trailer that used the tag #SherlockLives, fans adopted this tag -- the Three Patch Podcast was an early proponent of posting Sherlock S3-themed content with this tag.  The tag saw a spike in use whenever BBC promotional material was released, and during the Christmas minisode and each of the S3 episodes.  The biggest spike was on January 1, with over 3,300 uses.

Three Patch Podcast post:  [ http://threepatchpodcast.tumblr.com/post/68003538902/lets-show-the-bbc-that-fans-around-the-world-are ](http://threepatchpodcast.tumblr.com/post/68003538902/lets-show-the-bbc-that-fans-around-the-world-are)

Peak use:  over 3.3K

Images: BBC One; Fox Estacado/Three Patch Podcast

Toasty:

John/Sherlock/Mary posts, fanart, and fanfic saw a surge after each episode -- but mostly the second one

AO3 saw a similar surge in OT3 fic written in the week between TSoT and HLV

Artwork:  [ http://midoriner.tumblr.com/post/72402678023/sherlock-see-you-dont-have-to-be-alone-even-if ](http://midoriner.tumblr.com/post/72402678023/sherlock-see-you-dont-have-to-be-alone-even-if)

Toasty:

#Balletlock was briefly a popular AU in the middle of 2013, but activity in the tag rapidly died down.  After TSoT, when Sherlock expressed a fondness for dancing, there was a resurgence of activity.

Artwork:  [ http://threadear.tumblr.com/post/56485697706/ballet-sherlock-2-print ](http://threadear.tumblr.com/post/56485697706/ballet-sherlock-2-print)

Toasty:

Some fans had, shall we say, strong opinions about S3.

“Fix-it” fic addresses specific things that fans wish had gone differently in the show.  There was a jump after each season, but a particularly huge spike after S3.  

The bigger spike is partly explained by the overall increase in the fandom’s popularity, but not entirely.  Even if we look at the percentage of overall fandom activity labeled “fix-it”, we see a big spike for S3.

  


Toasty:

I compared the percent of Sherlock fic in 2013 vs. 2014 (Jan-early March) devoted to this ship, since Sherlock S3 aired at the beginning of the year.  Note that we’re only a little ways into 2014, and these numbers may change dramatically.

Relationships sorted in order of biggest absolute increase

Sherlolly saw biggest absolute increase.  Johnlockary had huge relative increase --  700%.  Sheriarty increased 120%

Mormor only decrease out of these relationships.

Artwork:  [ http://artbylexie.tumblr.com/post/49148256048/30-day-otp-challenge-otp-sherlock-x-molly-day ](http://artbylexie.tumblr.com/post/49148256048/30-day-otp-challenge-otp-sherlock-x-molly-day)

Penns-woods:

-Since the airing of the third season, one of the refrains seen in various places online is that the twist in the storyline has killed fandom, particularly fanfiction output. That whereas Reichenbach generated a plethora of post-reunion fics that puzzled out how Sherlock survived the fall, what he was doing for two years, and the reaction to his return, the conclusion to series 3 has stymied fan output.

-For this reason, I decided to take a look at all post series 2 and post series 3 fanworks on Ao3 over time to see whether there was a relative drop-off.

-Once again, I used the Sherlock TV tag. 

-One factor to note is that a portion of series 3 fanworks now include meta, which was previously not supported on Ao3.

Penns-woods:

I then looked in particular at fanworks that were tagged for Johnlock to see if there was a difference there during the same time frame following both series.

-In absolute numbers, two months after series 3 aired, there were roughly 3 times as many fanworks tagged Johnlock that were uploaded to Ao3 compared to those uploaded in the same time period post series 2.

-This does not necessarily mean that these fanworks incorporate any of the series 3 canon. In fact, some may have been generated in response to the canon as a way to ignore or rewrite or explain portions of series 3 that posed a challenge to those wishing to write Johnlock. 

-Therefore I looked at an emerging tag, the meta tag, to see what portion of post series 3 output might be non-fiction writing that attempted to analyze and deconstruct the series.

Penns-woods:

-Out of all the post series 3 fanworks, we can see meta is but a small portion with 4 works generated during the first week, 96 in the first month and 134 in the first two months.

-In fact, it may be that total meta output will continue but may have peaked for now until new material is available (e.g. spoilers or teasers for series 4).

-This is definitely a new tag worth watching and tracking.

Thank you!  :)


End file.
